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Selasa, 14 Mei 2013

The Progress of Web Design: From Tim Berners-Lee to Mobile Website Design

Evolution of Web Design
In the early
1990s, websites were text-based. The use of images and graphics were not
yet main stream at the time. The first web design was made of a single
column and text-based pages in Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML).
Website pages were a collection of text documents connected to each
other by internal links. Through research and development, significant
advancements were made. The first website was published in 1991 by the
inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee. He is also the current
director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) founded in 1994, which
oversees the web development and its standards.
In the mid 1990s,
table-based websites were introduced. Now web designers were able to
organize their web pages within cells of a table. It became possible to
create multiple column websites, which in return allowed better web
content organization and navigation layout. Table-based websites also
enabled customization of each element within the table. Web designers
could now insert background images within cells of a table; however,
good design principles were not really important. Website designers and
clients were interested by the hottest, latest and most advanced web
design technology available. As things started to evolve, frames,
animated texts and visual hit counters became part of web design. Frames
were used to clearly separate the body of a website from the sidebar
navigation. Animated texts and GIF images were used to capture the
website user's attention, while visual hit counters became a good way to
measure the popularity of a webpage. In 1994, Macromedia introduced
Flash, which is essentially a software used to produce Rich Internet
Applications (RIAs) to create animations and stream videos.
In the
late 1990s, Flash became more popular. Most websites became a
combination of table-based design and flash elements, with flash
animations including the company's logo, a flash-based navigation and
flash-based image galleries. The major Web Design innovation of the late
1990s was the introduction of Personal Home Page (PHP) which according
to Wikipedia, is a server-side scripting language designed for web
development. PHP gained a lot of popularity because it is free and
compatible with leading operating systems and web servers which make it
deployment easy across different platforms.
The 21st century
brought a lot of innovation to web design with the introduction of CSS.
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used to format an
HTML webpage. Now web designers could separate the content of a page
(HTML) from its styling or design (layout, colors, fonts, etc.). In the
early 2000s, Microsoft Internet Explorer became the first web browser to
fully support the CSS structure. In stride, the concept of intelligent
web was introduced with the advent of JavaScript. Now designers could
animate content without flash and perform a complex computation of data.
The use of drop-down menus and forms also became very popular. These
forms allowed internet users to generate content online, create personal
profiles and upload pictures.
In the mid 2000s, the semantic web
was born. This movement primary allows machines and computers to
understand website pages as well as human do. This was made possible by
inserting computer readable Meta tags about pages and their relation to
one another through technologies such as XML, TURTLE and N-TRIPLES.
The
last decade was marked by the advent of web 2.0 with some major
updates. The web became more and more interactive, and web applications
began to expand. Now web content can refresh itself without having the
entire page reloaded. The attention is now geared toward web content
(articles, Press Releases, graphics and videos) instead of just selling
products online. And HTML 5 was introduced as an alternative to Flash
and graphics.Mobile Web The New Trend
A
recent study showed that by 2014, mobile device sales will exceed
desktop sales. More and more web designers are converting their website
to a responsive version for users on the go. The new standard is gearing
towards tall and skinny websites, rather than short and wide lay-outs.
The navigation menu is significantly reduced to the most important
links. Nowadays, mobile sites are used for various purposes, such as
location detection, GPS tracking, etc. and the data is offer services,
such mobile coupons, local restaurant reviews, etc. Another recent study
stated that two-thirds of cell phone users say they access the
web/email from their device.